Tag Archives | Placebo

A new study finds that rising placebo responses may play a part in the increasingly high failure rate for clinical trials of drugs, but the authors of the study say that the increase in placebo responses occurred only in trials conducted in the United States. Accepted for publication in the journal Pain, the study analyzed […]

Putting a twist in a run-of-the-mill medication-versus-placebo trial has revealed that prior treatment with antidepressants appears to prime the brain to exhibit a much stronger response to a placebo. The new study, by UCLA researchers, suggests that how the brain responds to antidepressant medication may be influenced by its remembering of past antidepressant exposure. Aimee […]

Doctors may not like talking about it, but it’s becoming much more prevalent. A recent McGill University survey found that around 20 percent of general physicians have prescribed placebos for their patients, while more than one-third of psychiatrists have prescribed placebos or pseudoplacebos. Psychiatry professor and study author, Amir Raz, said the prescribing of pseudoplacebos […]

Modern medicine is based on what is considered the strongest possible evidence: the placebo-controlled trial. But placebos vary widely in their formulation and a paper published in the Annals of Internal Medicine calls into question the lack of any kind of standard in placebo formulation and also the appropriateness of drug companies providing their own […]

New evidence suggests that popular selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant medications can substantially change patients’ personalities, and researchers speculate that it is these changes in personality – rather than the supposed alleviation of depressive symptoms – that are responsible for improvements in mood. The research, conducted by psychologists from the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern […]

Placebos – sugar pills designed to represent “no treatment” in a clinical treatment study – work nearly as well as the actual medication for some people. Why this should be so remains a mystery, but researchers at UCLA believe they have found a possible explanation: genetics. Dr. Andrew Leuchter, a UCLA professor of psychiatry, and […]

A 10-cent pill doesn’t kill pain as well as a $2.50 pill, even when they are identical placebos, according to a new study from Duke University. The researchers used a standard protocol for administering light electric shock to participants’ wrists to measure their subjective rating of pain. The 82 study subjects were tested before getting […]

The nature of the so-called placebo effect continues to tantalize scientists as an increasing number of lab experiments are detecting robust physiological responses to placebos. And just to add fuel to the fire, a new study, published in the British Medical Journal, takes placebo investigations one step further by comparing the effects from two different […]

A study from the University of Michigan (U-M) has provided the first direct evidence that endorphins – the brain’s own pain-fighting chemicals – do play a role in the phenomenon known as the placebo effect. It appears that just thinking that a medicine will relieve pain is enough to prompt the brain to release these […]

Two active ingredients found in a number of non-prescription cough medicines are no better than non-medicated syrup for children with upper respiratory tract infections, says a Penn State College of Medicine study. “Consumers spend billions of dollars each year on over-the-counter medications for cough,” said Ian Paul, of the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical […]